Marxism
Humans produce their mode of life through the collective force of labour, and it is within the division of labour that personal differences begin to form based on the different activities, capacities and skills that people perform and develop.
For Marx, then, humans do not make the world or their own selves through pure reflection or contemplation: we do it through practical activity and practical intelligence, in which we engage with the world, transform it, and, in the process, transform our own selves
The loss of a job not only can lead to a feeling of powerlessness, it can also bring on a life crisis or identity crisis as the person is unsure about how to reconstruct their biographical narrative in the absence of a rite of passage between the state of employment and unemployment, or what can possibly come after it. - Burkitt p170
Seve
the biography of an individual is determined by their place within the social relations of production, and, of course, it is within that biographical trajectory that the self, or personality, is formed: the capacities, skills, needs and characteristics of the person.
self is dependent on social heritage born into which they absorb through work
However, Sève recognizes that in capitalism the majority of people have little control over their use-time and activities, and because of this will feel alienated to some degree in their lives
Alongside this, the time that is left over for people to engage in other activities outside of paid employment, or the alienating experience of unemployment, is what shapes the context of people’s lived experience and helps us to understand ‘the whole structure and development of real human personalities’ (Sève, 1978, p. 299)
Turner
in industrial capitalism leisure time is not only freedom from institutional obligations, work times, routines and disciplines, experienced as a space in which to recuperate, it is also freedom to enter symbolic worlds of entertainment, hobbies, sport and games. This freedom to play with ideas, fantasies and materials allows people to experience some sense of transcendence over social structural limitations, and also to engage in social
relations with friends that are more equal and of mutual benefit.
Bourdieu
habitus
Class
material constraints into which we are born, which affect life changes like access to education and important social contacts.
a priori of individual experience in historical sense (family, location, religion etc)
‘find their conditions of existence predestined and hence have their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class, become subsumed under it'.
Marxists.org. (2018).
Life-planning becomes all-important, which presupposes a mode of organizing time, by interpreting the past and preparing for the future. Lifestyle choices also have to be made, and here Giddens refers to the term ‘lifestyle’ as a more or less integrated set of practices that give material form to a particular narrative of self-identity. p 171
Similarly, our biographical trajectories are not just carved out by the way that we as individuals choose to organize biographical time, or in the way we choose a lifestyle related to particular places. For a start, we are born into certain places that we do not choose, and those places with their particular habitus can be embodied in every muscle and fibre of our selves p 171
what limits the scope for us to move between different lifestyle sectors is not any inability to make choices on the part of certain individuals, but how transposable our embodied dispositions and various social capitals are. With my accent, manners, bodily demeanour, dispositions, world-outlook, education, skills and capacities, will I ever get a place at that University, or get that job with that company, or feel comfortable living in that neighbourhood? If it is so unlikely, would I even think of it? While Giddens applauds Bourdieu for showing how lifestyle in the form of habitus is not just the result of class differences but one of the structuring features of stratification, he ignores the other side of Bourdieu’s structuration: that lifestyle is both the result and the structuring feature of class, in that it is central to the reproduction of class differences and inequalities. Thus none of us
are without limits in being able to choose our lifestyles, as so much rests on the habitus we were born into and that inheres in our embodied self, including our dispositions, tastes, capacities, interests and ambitions.
